You might not expect a man whose business is death to be upbeat and optimistic, yet Tyler Cassity is anything but somber.

The ambitious 36-year-old cemetery owner is enthusiastically breathing new life into the old burial business. Some of his ideas may even shock those who believe death rituals should be sedate: Films shown on the sides of mausoleums, funeral services broadcast via the Web, cemetery concerts and graveside kiosks containing digital documentaries of the dead tend to raise a few eyebrows.

Cassity and his brother own six cemeteries, including Hollywood Forever, a glitzy, hip final home of rock stars and celebrities, and Fernwood, a combination funeral home, cemetery and crematorium in Mill Valley that offers natural burials, sans embalming and all the paraphernalia used to ward off decomposition.

I interviewed Cassity last week while we walked the grounds of Fernwood. He is comfortable smoking a cigarette as he speaks about mortality, skittish about death but convinced there's an afterlife -- Cassity doesn't talk or walk or do much of anything in a straight line, preferring instead to follow his muse wherever she may lead him.

How did you get involved in the cemetery business?

Originally, I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to write gay novels like Dale Peck. So that's what I studied in college.

But along the way my plans changed. My family is in the funeral business, and I started thinking about new and different ways to memorialize people -- that's what really hooked me.

When I had the opportunity to purchase Hollywood cemetery it was pretty much a no-brainer. The place was in terrible shape when I got it. The previous owner had let it go to ruin, and a lot of people had removed their loved ones, had them disinterred. Nobody was stepping in to take care of it. People were saying it was awful. And I liked the place because it was old and it was decrepit and it was romantic. Everyone warned me against buying it, all the experts in this business. But after 10 years, I've proved them wrong.

What's the key to your success?

Well, the local people thought of us as the most bankrupt, neglected cemetery in the world. So it took a while for them to come back. In the interim, I had to make a business out of the people that were as new to Los Angeles as I was -- I'd just moved out from the Midwest. So I had to go to the newest immigrants' churches and temples and neighborhoods and let them know that I was there -- and unlike the previous ownership I could be trusted to care for their loved ones.

Going around to all of these different houses of worship, was that eye-opening for you?

It was. I have always been a traveler, and my business stance has been my spiritual stance. My belief is you have to silence the ego if you want to transcend anything. I didn't want to impose my ideas of death and funerals on people, I was willing to let them do whatever they needed to do, as long as it was legal. You want to build a particular statue, burn a certain kind of incense, chant, sing, dance -- whatever? That's fine, that's great. There's no dogma here. The more I see the more I know all religions have benefit. There's no one right way for all the world.

What religion or tradition do you practice?

I don't exactly know how to answer that. It's not like I can give you a one-word answer, like I'm a Christian or a Buddhist.

I've studied a lot of different traditions. Right now, I'm learning a lot about Tibetan practice, and I have a lot of Tibetan tantric altars around when I meditate. I'm also drawn to shamanism and the Gnostic scriptures. That's partly about making peace with my Baptist Bible Belt upbringing. I was a very spiritual child, and I got warped pretty badly through adolescence and Southern Baptist doctrine that basically said, "It's not good to be gay."

So you were raised in a fundamentalist family, and then you came out. How did they respond to that?

We are a strong family. We always stand by each other, even if we don't agree. I think everyone was deeply affected by my coming out. I think there was lot of grief and loss about that. Everyone, including me, had to deal with it in a personal way. It caused us all to change our religious views. It was a final kick out the door from the Methodist/Southern Baptist indoctrination that we had all been raised with.

You mean, everyone in your family abandoned Christianity because of your coming out?

Oh yeah. They told me that. They had to confront -- we all did -- the contradiction between being a fundamentalist Christian and the fact that I was gay.

And I came out during the start of the AIDS epidemic, so there was that complication. That was another thing that drew me to this business, I think.

Do you really feel like you have come to grips with death?

No. I do feel like I am forced to come to grips with the meaning or meaninglessness of life on a more regular basis than others because I'm not afforded the same luxury of pretending I'm immortal. I deal with death every day.

Is it difficult to be around grieving people all of the time?

There is a danger of becoming deaf and dumb to it. You kind of develop this feeling of otherness -- that we serve the dead and their loved ones but we're apart from all that. That said, I have yet to encounter someone in this business who doesn't empathize with the people they serve.

I live with the awareness that the people I love are going to die, and that does affect me. When someone I love does something that makes me angry, I'll think to myself: "They are going to die. We are all getting old. It really isn't worth throwing a fit about whatever the hassle of the day is." I also think this makes me not want to have any unfinished business. I'm less prone than other people to put things off.

Shifting gears a bit, let's talk about natural burial. Tell me about how it differs from the standard burial.

There isn't one single answer to that question, but there are some parameters we can discuss. One of them is simply that people do not want a traditional burial. They don't want an indestructible casket and a scientific treatment of the body involving the pumping of mysterious chemicals in a dark room by people in white jackets. They don't want an impersonal standard ceremony. That is the doctrine which is dying around us, and that is especially dead here in Northern California.

Basically, we're going back to the past because the qualities of green burial are also the ancient halachic requirements of Jewish burial: no embalming, no metal, a wood casket, preferably a shroud and no vault. People are returned to the earth.

Do people get a different sort of comfort from visiting a natural cemetery?

I'm a person who after doing this work for six years was sobbing outside the veterinarian's office when I put down my cat. I know we are going to die, and that is a source of our suffering. But nature makes it better, because nature reminds us that it's happening to everyone and everything. What dies returns. What you plant comes back. And there is nothing that I find more reassuring right now for people, including myself, than the idea of "Just put me in the ground." It's an idea that's resonating with a lot of other people.

Is green burial more or less expensive than standard burial?

It's kind of like real estate. We have plots here for $3,000 and $50,000 and everything in between.

Location, location, location, huh?

Right. In Hollywood Forever, the same 8-by-3 space on one side of the cemetery is $3,000. At the other side of the cemetery it's $100,000 because it's between Douglas Fairbanks and the water.

Some of the graves here do not appear to have gravestones. How do you know where people are buried?

We use rocks as gravestones. Then we embed GPS disks inside of them so that we can locate them. We also use standard surveys. So it's a three-part system. Even if you don't want anything on a grave, we still know where you are. Even if you don't want us to know where you are, we have to know where you are -- the state makes us know where you are. But most people want a mark.

Some people want us to use that GPS device to plug it into our digital inventory system so that, let's say, Molly, your grandchild, 10 years from now will be able to walk into this building and use her cell phone to find you through something like Google maps. And once Molly gets to your grave, her phone will access our Forever Network archive, where we have your family tree and a video of Grandma talking to her. I mean, that's the total concept. I can't tell you we're there yet. I can tell you that it's possible.

I read that Dee Dee and Johnny Ramone both chose to be buried at Hollywood Forever. How do you think people choose their burial places? Is it generally more of a spiritual issue or an ego?

There's a story there: Johnny chose his spot and his monument. And I was entrusted by him to do the statue of him while he was alive. As you probably know, Johnny was a rabid Republican. And I made the mistake of bringing him a Ukrainian Communist sculpture. We got kicked out of Johnny's house, and the statue ended up being done by a Hollywood set designer.

But to answer your question, I think people want to be buried or whatever in some place that's comfortable to them. You want to be where your milieu is. You want to be where your people are, you want -- if you are a gypsy, you want to be where the gypsies are,

Who are cemeteries for -- the living or the dead?

Both. If you believe that you will not be remembered, if you believe that there will not be an ending to your story, a period to it, I think it will affect the way you live. If you know that in death that there is no summation, that people no longer gather around and reflect upon who you were, the good parts and the bad parts, and grieve for us, I think that's kind of sad. I think most of us have given up the notion that someone's going to judge us and put us in a hot place or a cold place, a pretty place or an ugly place [when we die], but I think for the living who think about their death, to know that the community will go on and will have to confront that death and in some way come to terms with it together is comforting.

And for the living?

A cemetery can be an antidote. In Hollywood Forever the jasmine blooms in the spring, and the grass is green. But last year there was a frost, and so the grass was dead and everyone was upset. The people that worked there and the people that came to visit the graves -- everyone was angry. And it didn't matter that we could say, "You know, there's global warming and the climate is going through changes -- didn't you know it snowed in Malibu?" We just had to nod our heads because the truth is the green grass and the trees are as important there as they are here, because the only answer to death is life.

Cremation was really popular for a while, and it still is, but people are feeling like they want to place the ashes somewhere that they can easily visit, not scatter them in the wind or into the ocean. This is not a cultural shift in death care. This is a complete cultural shift, and death care is merely one more indication that it's occurred.

What do you think happens when people die?

That question seems almost too big for me to give you a specific answer. On a physical level, what happens when we die is that we decay. Now, if we want to deny that and be put in a vault and be basically pickled with embalming fluid like we were the last 50 years, we sure can! But many people don't want that. So on a physical level, what they want now when they die is a return. We return and can be the source of life again. Even in an elemental way, in becoming part of the earth.

And on a spiritual level?

I believe that we are energy evolving into higher energy. Life is a process of evolution. We might screw it up, like the dinosaurs screwed it up, and we might be one more life form that didn't make it.

But I was listening to a scientist being interviewed the other day about time. And he said that one of the most spiritual ways of looking at time as a scientist is to realize that this might be the moment in all of the billions and billions of years when the universe becomes conscious of itself. And if there is an agent for that consciousness, it's going to be us because we are the only ones who are conscious of ourselves and of our mortality and the only ones who yearn for transcendence.

So you feel like your soul or your spirit -- your energy -- lives on?

I don't want to put too fine a point on it, but I do. Maybe my dead grandmother is not [reincarnated as] a cow, but I like to think my dead grandmother could be a cow. I don't care if it's true or not, I find it useful.

Has working in the cemetery industry, the death industry, made death less scary to you?

I'm not scared of corpses, if that's what you mean. But I'm still going to get the creeps if I'm here at 2 a.m. and the fog comes in in a certain way and I'm in a certain mood.

Are you less scared about dying?

No. I don't want to die.

When I first started working in the business in L.A., there was a woman who told me, "Everyone in this business either becomes very religious, or they become alcoholics or drug addicts." And there's some truth to that. It depends upon how you respond to death. You either find great meaning in the meaninglessness, or you might go crazy. Everyone in this business, whether they like it or not, cannot engage in the same level of denial that the rest of the culture has about death.

Any sort of epitaph planned for yourself?

No! I'm terrified of the idea of a singular statement.

Finding My Religion wants to hear from you. Send comments on stories and suggestions for interview subjects to miller@sfgate.com.

During his far-flung career in journalism, Bay Area writer and editor David Ian Miller has worked as a city hall reporter, personal finance writer, cable television executive and managing editor of a technology news site. His writing credits include Salon.com, Wired News and The New York Observer.